That night, Holly dreams she is on top of the roof, looking at the stars. She used to climb on the roof when she was younger—pull herself out the window, balance on the railing, then swing herself up. To find herself there again is pleasant. In the dream, she’s stretched out on her back looking at a thousand golden stars, and they are as familiar and welcoming as family. When she comes back inside, one of the stars follows her through the window. It’s upset or worried, Holly can tell. It’s trying to warn her about something, but Holly is too tired to open her eyes. Besides, everything it says sounds like tiny bells and she can’t understand it. The star stands beside her bed for a long time, and then it disappears.
Holly wakes with a start. In the dark, there’s the faintest scattering of golden glitter about the room. It leads from the window to her bed, from her bed to the door. She could almost be imagining it because even as she sees it, it starts to fade. At first she thinks she’s still dreaming. But then she realizes where the trail must lead.
Jack.
She’s on her feet before she’s fully awake, and then she’s running down the hall and to the steps, following the faint iridescent glow. The glow leads to his room, is brightest next to his bed. She panics, ripping at the covers, pulling them back.
“Jack?”
He’s asleep. His skin is flushed, but when she puts her lips against his forehead, there’s no fever. She checks his face, checks everywhere she can see. There’s a new scar on his left wrist. Even as she notices it, it’s healing, vanishing in front of her eyes.
“Jack?” She shakes his shoulder.
“I had the strangest dream,” he murmurs. He opens his eyes, closes them again, snuggles deeper into the sheets. “A beautiful girl was standing over me.” He frowns, opens his eyes again.
“She was telling me about a pirate ship. And she called me the funniest thing. An insect, I think. A bee?” He looks up at Holly. “That’s not right.”
“A flea,” she says without thinking. “Because you were always underfoot, always attached to her. She used to call you Flea.”
They stare at each other in the dark. The golden light is fading. In another second it will be gone.
“Go to sleep,” she says unsteadily. She can’t tell either of them it was only a dream. “Do you want me to stay here with you tonight?”
He shakes his head. She’s about to tell him it’s okay, to reach out and caress his head, when she catches sight of his eyes. Just before the last bit of golden light winks out, she realizes that he is afraid.
But not of Eden. Of her.
* * *
She can’t go back to sleep. She turns the dream over and over in her mind. The sound of bells. The eerie glow. The impression of someone standing over her. She doesn’t know whether to nail the nursery window shut or throw it wide open in welcome. If it was truly Eden, how did she get here? What did she want? And why didn’t she stay? Holly thinks of that new scar on Jack’s wrist and shivers.
She’s the first one in the kitchen in the morning, ahead of even Jane. She makes tea, then decides there is no point in postponing the inevitable. She takes the syringe from the back of the fridge, prepares the injection, heads upstairs. She knocks on Jack’s door. There’s no answer, so she pushes open the door and steps inside, expecting to find him still asleep.
But his eyes are wide open and he’s staring at the ceiling. When she crosses the room to him, he sits up.
“Hello,” she says cautiously. So much has happened in the past twenty-four hours that she’s not even sure where to start.
He doesn’t answer, simply looks at her.
“Jack? Are you well?” She reaches for his forehead, but he turns his head away. “Jack?”
“I can’t remember what she said,” he says. “But I know that she was here.”
Holly doesn’t answer.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, but it’s as if he’s talking to himself. “It doesn’t matter what you say. I know what I saw.” He rubs his wrist absently, although whatever mark was there is gone. “She was here. She called me Flea. She talked about riding a boat. A pirate ship.”
Those last words stir something in Holly, a scrap of memory. She wants to chase it down, but all her focus is on Jack. She sits down on the bed beside him. “Jack,” she says, “I’m really worried about you.” She shows him the needle in her hand.
“I thought it was all gone,” he says flatly.
“I had a last supply, and had someone send it over. I think we should use it now. All of it.”
She waits, but he doesn’t speak.
“Jack . . . ,” she begins.
“It’s Eden, isn’t it?”
He’s looking at her the same way he looked last night, a mixture of fear and . . . something else. Repugnance? Her stomach clenches.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not stupid. When you have low iron, you take pills,” he says. He turns away. “I worked it out. That’s why there was all that medical equipment in Cornwall. Not because she was sick. But because she was some kind of perfect donor for me. And when she disappeared, so did the blood supply.”
“Jack, she was sick.”
“And all these years, you kept her that way for me?”
“No! Jack, listen. I—”
“You’re the one who’s sick. Not Eden. Not me.”
“Please, Jack, you need to listen. And you need to stay calm.” She tries to keep her voice steady.
“You kept my sister chained to a bed, and you’re telling me not to get worked up?”
“It’s not like that.” She reaches out to him, but he recoils, and it’s as if he’s slapped her. Too late, she realizes her mistake. By not telling him the truth from the beginning, she’s allowed him to imagine it now as so much worse.
“Listen.” She tells him again about the accident, how Eden never woke up. “I did everything I could. I took Eden to every doctor I could find. You have to believe me.” She blinks back tears.
“Right. If you loved her so much, why did you use her like that?”
“After the car crash, your right leg was destroyed, and your left wasn’t much better. You had so many injuries, had broken so many bones—you fatigued so easily,” she says. She looks at him and realizes some part of her still sees him, will always see him, as the frail child he once was. “You spent all your time trying to follow her, but you couldn’t. And then I came home from the hospital, from being with her, and you ran to me.”
“So?”
“You hadn’t been able to run—hadn’t even been able to walk, not really—since the car crash.”
He looks at her uncomprehendingly.
“When Eden fell, she hit her head—that’s why she couldn’t wake up. There was a lot of blood. And somehow it got on you, on your injuries, and it . . . healed you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s something special about Eden’s blood,” she says. She leaves out any mention of magic, of Peter Pan. Jack is a child of New York, not London. He has no interest in fairy tales, and Holly’s always insisted this particular story wasn’t true. “But the help it gives wears off. It doesn’t last forever—only a month or so. You need another infusion of it or you start to fade.”
With a teenager’s self-absorption, he skips over the question of why Eden is different. “What happens if I stop taking it?”
“I don’t know. I swear.” There’s a long pause while Holly weighs what to say. She decides that in this case the truth can only help. “Worst case? There’s a chance you could die. You were injured so badly, the doctors were never certain you would recover.”
She sees it on his face, the knowledge that what she’s been doing has been keeping him alive all these years. And then she sees it harden into something she doesn’t recognize.
“There has to be another choice,” he says. “Something else that would work. A drug. Or therapy. Or maybe I’m really healed after all this time. You don’t know for sure.”
“I don’t think so,” she says gently. “Not the way you’ve been feeling. This is the longest you’ve gone without an injection, and every time you exert yourself, or do something like drink, you get worse. I don’t know what’s going on—maybe, because you’re hitting puberty, your body and how it responds is changing. But the injections aren’t working the way they used to.”
“But I’m fine right now!” And then it’s his turn to pause, and she sees him remember something. He looks at his wrist, rubs it. She follows his glance. There’s nothing there.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “I don’t care. I won’t take it again.”
“Jack . . .”